|
Steven Sametz (born 1954, Westport, Connecticut) is active as both conductor and composer. He has been hailed as "one of the most respected choral composers in America."〔Busse, Thomas. ''San Francisco Classical Voice: Classical Music in the Bay Area''. 24 June 2008. Web. 14 Oct. 2010. == Early training, education and influences == Sametz’s earliest piano works date from the age of six. During junior high and high school years in his native Westport, Connecticut, he began to write for choirs and chamber ensembles and undertook large-scale scoring of works for band and orchestra with encouragement of his teachers. Summer studies at the Amherst Music Center (Amherst, Maine) focused on piano, viola, voice, baritone horn and composition. He continued to compose during his undergraduate years at Yale University (BA, 1976), where his teachers included Robert Fountain (conducting) and Alejandro Planchart (early music). He spent his junior year at Yale abroad, studying conducting with Helmuth Rilling in Germany and composition with Sylvano Bussotti in Italy. He spent four summers at the Aspen Music School, studying choral and operatic conducting with Fiora Contino and voice with Jan DeGaetani. From 1976-79, he attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning the Masters and Doctor of Music Arts degrees in Choral Conducting. His primary teachers included Robert Fountain (choral conducting), Catherine Comet (orchestral conducting), Carlos Moses (opera conducting) and Bruce Benward (music theory). Largely self-taught as a composer, Sametz’s style is influenced by Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony, French Impressionism, the works of Igor Stravinsky and world music. His early exposure to choral singing, beginning in fifth grade, gave him a predilection for singing lines and communication of expressive text through music. Beginning with some of his earliest works (e.g.: e.e, cummings’ ''thy fingers make early flowers'', (1972) for soprano solo and string quartet; ''Farewell'' (1972) setting Kahil Gibran’s text for ''a cappella'' chorus) it is the expressive line of the text that guides the compositional process. Spiritual practices and world travel have contributed to Sametz’s style. Raised in a Jewish tradition, he was hired in 1976 as assistant choirmaster and associate organist at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Norwalk, CT. He worked there much of his Yale undergraduate career, commuting from New Haven to Norwalk. At the same time he was being exposed Christian liturgy, he was beginning practice in Transcendental Meditation and would later study Vipassana and Zen meditation techniques. During his high school and college years, he traveled widely in Europe, studying composition briefly in Nice with Tony Aubin. During his graduate studies, he served on the musical staff of St. Paul’s Church in Madison, Wisconsin, conducting a small choir devoted to performance of Gregorian chant reading from the Liber Usualis. Elements of Catholic liturgy and chant may be heard in several of Sametz’s pieces: ''¡O llama de amor viva! A Mystical Vision of St. John of the Cross'' (1987) is based largely on the Easter chant, ''Victimae Paschali laudes''; ''Nevermore will the Wind ''(2002'') ''uses the Gregorian Requiem chant. In the 1980s and 90s, he made three trips around the world, traveling widely in Southeast Asia, where he was influenced by the musical traditions of Japan, Thailand, and Indonesia, returning with an extensive collection of musical instruments. In many of his works there is a sense of timelessness common to Buddhist practice and Christian prayer. The combined influences of Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony, Impressionism and Asian music led to a style more based in timbre and overlapping melodic lines (at times aleatoric) than in harmonic motion. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Steven Sametz」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|